Women writers – is that a fair categorization

Does the reader really care about the gender of the author when they read a book? Does knowing the gender of the author precondition the reader? When a book review mentions that it is a book written by a woman author, does it become easier or tougher to sell the book?

It is true that I have read more books written by men. In Bengali, the writers I grew up reading were Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, Satyajit Ray, Leela Majumdar, Premendra Mitra; Ashapurna Devi, Nihar Ranjan Gupta, Banaphool, Shankar, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Sibram Chakraborty, Bani Basu, Joy Goswami, to name a few. The number of women authors were fewer. If I drew up a list of writers in English and Hindi, the list of women writers would have fewer entries. Maybe I never made a conscious effort to read a book because it was written by a woman.

Abhijit Bhaduri is the Chief Learning Officer of Wipro, author & enthusiastic enough to try anything. Is a prolific writer, speaker and blogger. Has published books like : Don’t Hire The Best & the MBA series. His works can be explored on his site http://www.abhijitbhaduri.com/